Caves of Myrddin: Nothing quite like the smell of smoldering PC.

A Space Wizard kinda looks
like this but with a robe and
glowy Tron lines all over.

So last night the game store group made two trips to the dungeons below Castle Dundagel.  The first one was a bit of a disaster.  Fifteen men/dwarves/elves plus a donkey went in, but only four came out, each carrying a blasted corpse of one of the dudes who didn't save versus the Space Wizard's fireball.  Fred the Dwarf would have been among the dead, but he threw himself inside of Father Aethelred's protection from evil circle just before the fireball detonated.  That turned his roll of 7 into an 8, which is good enough to save when you're a dwarf with some levels under your belt.

Since these guys are the ones who plundered the Dragon's lair, they hauled ass over to the Bishop of Cornwall and spent some money to get some raise dead spells thrown on their comrades.

One of the guys who was raised was Mike's brand new first level PC, the cleric Brother Walter.  This was Mike's first run.  He showed up just as we're starting and said something like "Hi, I'm Mike!  I just found your blog about 15 minutes ago and I saw you were running tonight."  That's the second time this has happened.  The first time there was a Total Party Kill fifteen minutes later ("If we can kill this sleeping dragon before it breathes...").  The second time the new guy wakes up dead with his boss's boss staring him in the face.  Good times.  Incidentally, Mike had played 2e once before but got his sea legs with 3e, so this was an entirely new type of D&D for him.  He seemed to be digging on it.

I can't tell you about the second trip into the dungeons, because the party never came back out.